2013 Joan Judge

Our first Visiting Scholar will be Prof. Joan Judge, York University PhD Columbia University 1993.

Professor Judge taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before moving to Toronto in 2005 and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Division of Humanities at York University. She is a cultural historian of modern China with a focus on print culture and women’s history at the turn of the twentieth century.

She studied the journal Funü shibao 婦女時報(The women’s eastern times) intensively, focusing on two related themes: the relationship among discursive, visual, and ideological registers, and more explicitly between texts, photographic modes of representation, and the new Republican ethos; and the emergence of a demographic of women that she calls "Republican Ladies.”

Publications

Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford University Press, 1996).

The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford University Press, 2008).

As an important form of "digital humanities,” scientific databases can greatly support innovative scholarly research, and are thus increasingly valued in the academic world. This course offers MA and advanced BA students with a good command of Chinese an opportunity to learn how to work on/with a scientific database. We will take the database "Chinese Women's Magazines in the Late Qing and Early Republican Period" (http://womag.uni-hd.de) as an example, learning how to process text and images, how to collect and analyse metadata, how to define research potential, how to communicate with IT experts and give constructive feed-backs to improve the functionality of the database. The course will consist of 15 team sessions (90 minutes), and 15 individual work assignments. After the semester, well trained students will have chance to continue working on the database.read more